


colour me clear

by wanderNavi



Series: wanderNavi Sampler [2]
Category: Fire Emblem: Kakusei | Fire Emblem: Awakening
Genre: Chrom with a neckbeard, Enemies to Friends, Gen, Grave digging, Grief, Immortality, Post-Apocalypse, description of corpses
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-18
Updated: 2020-04-18
Packaged: 2021-03-02 04:40:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 15,212
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23709298
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wanderNavi/pseuds/wanderNavi
Summary: It would be terrible to hate the only other person left alive.
Relationships: Chrom & My Unit | Reflet | Robin
Series: wanderNavi Sampler [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1708303
Comments: 4
Kudos: 13





	colour me clear

**Author's Note:**

> Title from “Backyard” by Of Monsters and Men. Honestly, the whole “Beneath the Skin” album works well for this piece. 
> 
> There are surely typos lingering that I'll pick out eventually, but this thing languished in my wips folder for like. a year. And then it got alarmingly long. And I just wanted it done.
> 
> See end notes for further content warnings.

Chrom sees Grima’s vessel in snatches and glimpses, a far-off figure cloaked in corrosive power, and Frederick pointing, spyglass in hand, “There, look, on the ridge.”

A figure’s shadow stands dark against the orange, green, purple bands of the setting sun. Chrom didn’t catch it at first, mingled among the thin trees. Then it shifts and he does. It retreats down the other side of the hill, while he and Frederick observe in silence.

* * *

Given the acidic air and the oil of death that always hung in Grima’s wake, Chrom had assumed that the world under the fell dragon’s victory would be a wasteland. Barren earth and ash clouds masking the sun. Not lush greenery thrusting limbs and shoots through walls and roofs and floors, animals turning feral among the uncut grass and wildflowers. Nature reclaimed dominion over the abandoned land alarmingly quickly. If it weren’t for all the half-rot, half-bone skeletons, it would be peaceful, beautiful.

He goes to a town and finds it empty; he goes to a village and finds it empty; he goes to a city and finds it –

The worst is the dog he finds, tethered by its lead of metal chains and its hunger to its master’s courtyard, so starved and sickly all its ribs show through its molting pelt and even when Chrom comes back with a slab of meat it can’t lift its head to sniff. The worst is the boarding house he finds with beds laid out in neat rows, the children still under the covers with their eyes all closed as their flesh rots and soils the sheets. The worst is halls full of the dead, the worst is the field of crops growing wild and mutated, the worst is the _emptiness_ of a square and harbor that should be so full of life that it’s almost impossible to walk through the press of bodies, _the worst is –_

Chrom’s palms and fingers are rougher than they’ve ever been and he’s never washing the dirt out from under his worn short nails. He couldn’t protect these people, these humble souls failed by his flag and crest, but he can ask for forgiveness as he buries their bodies where the animals can’t tear at their flesh and marrows further. He pries and breaks open windows to vent the stale smells of unoccupancy and decomposition during his stays. He travels from settlement to settlement, a month or so here, a month or so there or along the way there, in an unceasing chain that becomes like an instinctual habit of always moving forward and never, never looking back. Maybe his heart harbors a hope that there’s someone else out there, breathing and blinking, _alive_ among the dead piled high everywhere he turns. That please, let there be anyone else out there, despite the first year of only death, the second year, and the fifth year.

The work of laying the dead to rest never ends. Chrom has all the time in the world now. No more armies to lead, castles to run, or kingdoms to govern – there’s no one to take him from this work.

* * *

There’s no one to tell Chrom what happened: what smashed trees and buildings to matchsticks, what crumbled the stone to dusty pebbles, what burned shadows onto the ground with a killing light. He sees, from far, far away, the flattened earth, the extinguished fires, the – obliteration. Annihilation.

Cautiously, he draws closer, and thinks he’s imagining the faint taste of magic sticking to the roof of his mouth. He takes a swig of water to chase away the metallic taste. As he approaches the blackened earth of the vast crater at the center, he fails to find bodies.

The wind divulges no secrets.

* * *

A crunching sound snaps too loudly through the air. Chrom turns on the balls of his silent feet, one hand resting on the hilt of his rarely drawn sword, the other holding the shovel propped against his shoulder. Instead of a bear like he expects, a person stands beside a tree several yards away. His hands tighten their grips.

“This is a surprise,” says a voice flaking off rust. The figure draws closer, silent now that Chrom’s attention has been sufficiently acquired. There’s a stain like the lichen on the tree bark on their palms and Chrom berates himself for not noticing long, _white_ hair among the leaves. “I thought this land was too dead for you to still be around.”

Chrom swings his shovel off his shoulders and tosses it to his other hand, the better to draw Falchion out of its scratched sheath. Dead, flat eyes watch him and this being that’s no longer human flicks a tongue over chapped, pale lips. He recognizes who – what – this is now, seen from across battlefields at the center of a storm of cracking lightning and hissing fire too many times.

Grima’s vessel says in greeting, “Naga’s herald.”

The last conversation, if it could be called that, he had with someone else was years ago, the tattered remains of his forces pushed back over the threshold of Ylisstol’s castle, as he screamed at Ricken over the sound of battle to grab what mages and healers he could to fall back and protect the civilians trapped inside. Three days later, Chrom woke up on the bed of his obvious failures and promptly threw up from the smell.

“What’s the shovel for?” the vessel asks.

“What else are shovels used for?” His voice sounds like something shredded by a barn cat. “Digging holes.”

“Holes,” it repeats, toneless.

Chrom clears his throat. “Yes. The kind you put dead bodies into.”

The first few he did, he underestimated the dimensions, first in terms of the graves themselves and then the amount of space so many graves put together would take. He figured out pretty quickly that he didn’t feel hunger or the drowsiness of sleep anymore, but thankfully the burn of physical exertion stayed. He dragged stones from the heaps of rubble remaining of the home that raised him and set them at the head of each freshly turned pile. Crooked lines ran through the flat fields their servants had spent so much effort maintaining a uniform, trimmed green, now ruined with dirt and mounds everywhere. It hadn’t felt right to wreck the farmland beyond the town walls. Chrom let all the hunting dogs and horses and cats loose to the wild, least they starve, with doors left open regardless of weather damage blown inside for those that didn’t seem to get the message and kept coming back, waiting for returning masters.

Grima’s vessel takes in the dirt in the seams of his hand and caked on his pants and sleeves where he hasn’t washed it out yet. “Very well,” it says, ignores how Chrom tenses for a fight, and turns away.

He lets it go. It would be terrible to hate the only other person left alive.

* * *

Chrom travels far enough west that he can see the mountains rising along the horizon in faint blue ridges. Foxes and pheasants make their dens and nests in the creaking, empty homes. Using a knife picked up months ago, Chrom breaks into the most intact home and sneezes profusely for hours trying to clear out dust.

He finds enough cloth to clumsily patch the tears and split seams on his coat and pants. Doesn’t think about how eventually with time, the cloth will rot and crumble too and then he’ll be in a real fine mess, trying to learn from scratch a skill that no one ever thought he would have to come in close contact with. What royalty made their own cloth? Not even Emmeryn or Lissa learned how to spin thread and yarn from cotton and wool.

A whole season passes since Chrom ran into Grima’s vessel and he has fortnights to wonder under the waxing and waning moon what it was doing so far east from its dominion in Plegia. Back during the war, it seemed to hardly ever leave the deserts. Basilio rumbled to him once that scouts spotted it hovering about the border between Plegia and Ferox, but not for long, given Ylisse’s forces clashed with it not five days later and came out for the worst for it. To encounter it well within Ylisse’s borders, further east than it ever managed to push while backed by an army of dark mages and scimitar-wielding horsemen, that unsettles Chrom’s nerves.

Should have gone after it, he reprimands himself again and sets off for the town square. Most of the homes and building are empty of bodies. The residents must have evacuated, swept away by the rising waves of war and armies washing through the western plains retreating and advancing in turns. He finds the church and its graveyard, finds a broom and cleans the stones as best he can, lighting the incense and candles in a prayer these bones and souls have not heard in too long. The sun sets long before his work is done.

* * *

With winter’s arrival, Chrom heads south for the slightly warmer waters of the coast. The humidity hangs thick in the air and no rain or sleet comes down for weeks. Chrom avoids settlements for the time being, wandering through forests and along cliffs for a placid set of days instead.

Ever since – well, ever since everything, most of his day pass by that way: filled to the brim with the chatter of birds and the ramblings of the wind and the whispers of the leaves and the crackling of the ice and the sermons of the rain. He walks like a thief through his own lands, with no one to catch him, and washes his rough hands and feet in water drawn from rivers and wells. He finds cellars of wine and rooms of beer, sniffing at what hasn’t gone bad, and helping himself to drinks as the crickets and frogs come out at twilight.

He cannot avoid the ruins of human development for long and enters a port town at dawn. As the sun rises higher into the sky, he comes across a dog with a litter of puppies, born just a few days ago. Her tail thumps the ground with pride and Chrom smiles down at them.

“That dog bites.”

As with the branch snapping, it says this as a courtesy, announcing its silent presence from a distance. Its hair has gone wilder and its cloak more ragged, but the same expressionless eyes regard Chrom with a fixed neutrality.

Chrom straightens from his crouch. “She seems to like me. That might just be you.”

Its eyes flick down and back up. “Maybe,” it concedes.

They stand at a stalemate, its hands limp at its sides, his hands clenching at his sides. In the distance, waves crash in the harbor. Eight minutes of mutual silence later, it asks, “Where’s your shovel?”

“Left it at the place I'm staying at,” Chrom says.

An expression finally graces its face, a small frown. Its hand raises to point towards the piers, and it says, “There are bodies in that direction. And at the barracks. Since you seem to care about that.”

The vessel falls into the silence of struggling to find more words to say. “How are you alive?” it bursts out in the end.

Like Chrom has any idea. “I could ask the same of you.”

It glances back down at the squirming litter of puppies by Chrom’s feet. As abruptly as last time, it turns away and disappears around a building’s corner. Chrom sprints after it and skids to a stop staring down an empty and silent alley.

* * *

Underneath the silence, the earth and air hums immortal, a vibration in the bones of the ground, shifting by the inches and fractions of inches, the transmutation of stones in a cauldron of heat, an ageless cycle without a mind for the living on its surface or the dead trapped within its layers. Long ago the mountains rose and far into the future the mountains will rise. Tension mounts along the cracks, teeth upon the miles-long waves.

He lies on his back on the smooth surface of a great gray slab of rock, dust in his hair and under his fingertips, the sun shining red through his closed eyelids, a light wind carrying the scent of new flowers. His heart beats, a slow thrum, in his chest and up his neck and down his wrists and ankles, in the shells of his ears and the curves of his skull; he can hear it beating unhurried and unaware of the time it marks with each rebounding thump, mindful only of the blood passing through his arteries and veins and diffusing through his capillaries and entangling in his lungs, unfailingly beating its drum.

* * *

Their following encounters are too sporadic and random for the vessel to be following Chrom around. They genuinely seem to be crossing paths every now and then on their mutual wanderings. Not once does Chrom manage to catch it off guard.

In a town that might be Bretten, Chrom unearths a strip of leather string that’s somehow still supple enough for use without disintegrating in his hands with each touch. Hacking off his hair every couple of months with whatever reflective surface he could acquire had quickly proven cumbersome, as he kept missing chunks and edges on the back of his head. The last three weeks, he’s been completely without still water or polished metal wider than the plane of his swords, having accidentally lost half his pack in the middle of a storm. His hair’s grown out long enough to tie back into a low tail.

Grima’s vessel regards Chrom with a strained edge to its stance, a look much diluted from nonplussed across its eyes and the lines of its face. Its head cocks to the side, like a bird. Chrom taps the hilt of Falchion expectantly.

“You’ve … grown a beard,” it eventually says.

A cold front is passing through the region, bringing a day full of winds gusting at high speeds with it. Said wind flings the vessel’s hair around its head and all over its face. It raises a hand, batting away strands that catch in its mouth.

“Shaving hasn’t exactly been my greatest priority the last few days. I’ve been busier trying to not drown in the rising floods,” he tells it, with a certain bead of smug amusement as he watches it continue fighting against its long hair. He scratches along his chin. “I might keep it.”

Amazingly, the vessel actually frowns. This is the first emotion he’s ever seen from it that wasn’t a grim determination to slaughter all his forces.

“Don’t.”

“You don’t get to tell me what to do.”

“It looks terrible. Get rid of it.”

“I don’t need to listen to you.”

“You stink of river muck,” it tells him and walks away with great prejudice.

* * *

Chrom _does_ look terrible with a long beard and even a short one reminds him of his father’s portraits too much. He shaves it off when he remembers to and has the time.

Crossing the western mountain passes over to the deserts and deadlands of Plegia during the summer isn’t one of Chrom’s better ideas. He lays low during the heat of day, eyes narrowed against the wavering air above the sands, and travels by the chilly night. Chrom hasn’t remotely finished burying the dead of his citizens, but the nagging sense that the civilians of the other kingdom shouldn’t be exposed to the elements either builds with each year.

Dry heat decomposes bodies differently. He’s gotten used to handling more bones than flesh and seeing parched skin stretched thin over dried ligaments and muscles surprises him at first. The insects that birth and die on the dried streaks of decomposed fat are different. There’s something scaly and brittle about the people he finds. The chewed open cavities of scavenging animals taking their pick of once soft internal organs are the same.

Plegia’s customs for their dead are different from Ylisse’s, even during the distant past when the two kingdoms were under one crown and banner. Chrom doesn’t have the first clue what he should be doing, and he holds out hope that he might run across Grima’s vessel and ask … them some questions, if he can manage to keep them around for more than five minutes. But for all two and a half years he spends among the gutted ruins of Plegia, he never sees hide or hair of them.

* * *

Nearly the instant Chrom crosses the borders into Ferox, he’s ambushed.

Grima’s vessel smiles at Chrom, closed mouth, motionless eye, and a stain of something resembling dried blood on their neck with a smudge on the edge of the jaw, like the left behind fleeting caress of a lover. This is the first time they have ever smiled at Chrom and if the rest of their smiles are all like this, Chrom wants this to be the last time too.

“Naga’s herald. It’s been a long time,” they say.

Chrom gestures at his neck with an awkward flick. “You, uh, have something on your neck?”

They make no move to check and continues staring at Chrom with amusement as friendly as a block of dried ice placed in his hand. Chrom coughs, tries not to halfway through, and chokes, “Right. Okay.”

As much as the vessel tends to initiate conversation, they don’t do much to carry one. Nor do they do much as Chrom takes cautious steps forward and around their faintly shivering form. The fur of the cloak draped upon them seems well-cared for, clean despite the mysterious smudges on their skin. There’s a clumsy messiness along some seams and hems and Chrom decides it’s not unreasonable that they would try figuring out how to replace the tattered clothing falling apart at the shoulders and sides he last saw them in. He shifts the pack on his back into a more comfortable position and crunches through the icy snow until he pulls up beside them.

Their dark eyes follow him, framed and slightly obscured by the strands of now dirty white hair. His hand never leaving Falchion, Chrom asks, “What are you doing here?”

“Am I not allowed to be here?”

“No.”

“Then I shall be here.”

“That’s not much of an answer.”

They smile again. It’s still terrible. “It’s not much of a question.”

The lines and ridges of his knuckles and fingers burn with the cold as he taps cautiously on Falchion’s pommel and the worn smooth wood of the shovel he’ll have to replace soon. A sensation thick and heady builds in his throat and it’s the only explanation why he lets the product of idle wishful thinking get to him.

Traveling alone never stopped being lonely and he’d spent the last year making about turns to a companion that never existed to make comments like, “Okay, but I really don’t know what this is supposed to be,” and, “Hey, just _why_ are there so many bug corpses here, isn’t this a food stall, is this on _purpose_?” For years Chrom barely got a moment to himself and for years he got too many. It’s the main reason why he asks what he hadn’t ever before, “Do you want to travel together for a while?”

This catches the vessel off guard enough that their mouth parts just slightly, then they freeze with their head tilted to the side again because apparently they never experience neck strain. If Frederick was still around, this is the point where he’d start yelling about being cautious and more responsible, for Naga’s sake what are you thinking, milord? This is the general that faced his army, that killed his kingdom, that’s probably still looking for ways to kill him off too, so why? Well, the idea doesn’t seem _that_ horrible. Chrom’s not all too clear on the details of the vessel’s exact relation to the fell dragon, but it had been proven in a battle that nearly pinched Chrom’s forces in half, thereby cutting off supplies and avenues of retreat, that the two can act independently of each other. He also hasn’t seen Grima itself since the fall of humanity, so the idea of traveling with its vessel – not Chrom’s worst.

They draw themselves together slowly and say, “You want to travel with me to do … what? Lose a fight with the permafrost?”

“The Feroxians do pyres.”

They shake their head. “You’re out of your mind. No.”

* * *

The sun begins to set and still the vessel hovers around the periphery of his notice.

Chrom’s footsteps cross paths with fresh prints for the third time and he hisses, scuffing his numb feet through the ice and snow. The tracks head to his right and he breaks into a noisy run to follow, Falchion thumping against his leg in its sheath with each step. Purple shadows cut between the orange glow spread thickly across the ground with no clouds to impede the sunlight’s painterly craft. He manages to startle a family of deer while sliding down a hill’s slope.

Their footsteps continue forward, hugging the forest edge. Chrom pushes his way past needles and half hidden eddies and slopes. The forest’s boundaries twist and curve, each shadow only growing longer and deeper as the sun swiftly sinks into the earth. He runs through the shadowed shawl of night pulling across the land in silken star-studded folds of abyssal blue. He runs and he – _why is he doing this, why is he stretching his fingertips to the farthest he can reach, like if he just stretches a little harder, he can reach past the limits of his skeleton and grasp a hand already turned away, that had never_ – and he runs.

Moonlight shines in patches between the sparse, yet all individually huge, evergreens.

* * *

Just because Chrom doesn’t have to sleep, doesn’t mean he completely abstains. He climbs the trees that grow thick and strong from the carved-out hollows of what once were the cellars and foundations of homes, only identifiable now by the stones he lays his hands on, too smooth and in off-color blocks. Birds and squirrels settle around him quizzically, watching him lash himself onto a suitable branch. He closes his eyes.

There are insects and frogs, the vibration of sound rising into the moist air. The water in the clouds above shiver as they roil and rub together in response to the wind’s insistent pushing. In the air: the smell of cedar, the fragrance of plum blossoms, the ozone of a storm oncoming. He breathes in, with all of time unrolling before him in its wide, lazing current. The world remains an indominable monument.

* * *

Grima’s vessel sleeps like a corpse: splayed out in whatever manner they dropped onto the ground in, no matter how uncomfortable it makes Chrom’s muscles in sympathy, unmoving to most anything he does to try prodding them awake. Besides the faint shuttering noise of their breathing, they sleep silently and when they dignify to wake, it’s with a silent opening of the eyes and the murmur of cloth shifting as they roll up into a sitting position, with no in-between stage sandwiched in the middle of consciousness and unconsciousness.

It also turns out they’re as far from an early riser as could be. Chrom sews by the pale purple sunlight of the rising sun, impatiently waiting for them to rouse. He’d made the singular mistake of shaking them awake once and got a fistful of shredding wind to the shoulder for the trouble.

Thread, oil, cloth – they’re long gone and Chrom long submitted to blindly groping his way through the tradecrafts he’d taken for granted in his youth. Even his old self-proclaimed duty nears its end, it seems, at least within the confines of Ylisse. By now, he’s probably covered all of the land, sans the hardest to reach. He’s climbed almost every mountain, trekked through almost ever valley. But beyond this land, beyond the glinting ocean, where his allies and enemies – even if only for a short while – are in the west and even further beyond there, he does not know their fates.

The vessel awakens just before the sun reaches its zenith.

Instead of a cordial, “Good morning,” he tells them, “It’s completely beyond me why you sleep so much.”

The vessel frowns lightly as they climb to their feet. Golden-brown pine needles cling to their hair, inevitably picked from the thickly coated ground of Ylisse’s eastern Slieve Mountains. “Are you going to bother me about this every day?” they demand.

Chrom bites his thread loose and says, “No.”

They squint at him.

Around the third time Chrom tracked down the increasingly aggravated vessel, he finally convinced them to travel with him after putting out the minor bush fire they both accidentally created coming to blows over his insistence. Turns out exposure to sentient talking beings for longer than two minutes at a time does the vessel some good. The vessel still comes and goes as they see fit, never staying with him for long; four out of the six times they traveled together, they only spent a morning or an afternoon in his company before splitting ways. But they’ve started picking up how to talk and actually mold expressions, though there are still frequent slip ups that involve frozen blinking and head tilts and Chrom groping for what they’re thinking or feeling.

By the millimeters, Grima’s vessel develops a personality. For the most part, Chrom leaves them to it since he doesn’t have the first clue about what he could do or say for them that wouldn’t result in their enthusiastic attempt to disembowel him.

Whatever they decide about Chrom’s claim, they don’t articulate, walking over to their pack instead. Chrom begins putting away the spilled open guts of his belongings himself; he ties off and loops the loose thread, tucks his needle into the thick leather sheet bundled around his whetstone and perpetually near empty bottle of oil, and stuffs a sloshing gourd of water at the top of the pile in his bag.

With a flick, they toss their hair over their shoulders and ask, “Are you still heading east?”

Glancing up from securing his rows of straps, Chrom shrugs and says, “Yes.”

Another flick of the head. “Then we split ways. I’m heading south.”

“Okay,” Chrom says warily. “You sure you don’t want company for longer?”

“The only thing worthwhile to the east is Mount Prism.” They stare expectantly at Chrom.

And well, they’re _not_ entirely wrong, though Chrom hadn’t been thinking at all about that. In fact, he’d been – he’d been completely ignoring the, ah, only thing worthwhile to the south. Ylisstol.

“Alright,” Chrom says slowly, uneasily, willfully skating clear of such questions as _why south_ and _are you completely unable to spend more than eighteen hours in my presence_. He slings his pack onto the grooves they must be wearing down into his shoulders.

“I’ll see you around then,” he says.

With what’s probably a mild look of disdain, they pull their hair free from their bag against their back and walk away. Chrom watches the pale streak of their form weaving between the trees, until the forest green completely swallows them up. And even then, Chrom remains where he’s standing, as if they’re a beacon forcing him to face and see a truth he refused to behold since he left its borders. Like the vessel, Chrom didn’t spare a backwards glance as he walked away from Ylisstol, what must be decades ago now, with a shovel in one hand and calluses newly formed on his palms from the graves.

* * *

Chrom isn’t entirely certain of what he was expecting to find when he finally washed up at Mount Prism or if he even _had_ any expectations. He arrives at cold forests draped upon the mountain in silent sheets, a distant semblance to dust accumulated in water damaged dwellings adrift in an endless fog of dreary eternal rains. The dead air shivers in the void of animal life. The higher he climbs, the stronger the taste of ozone sticks to his tongue and the back of his dry throat that no amount of swallowing can wet.

If he breaths deep, he can fool himself into smelling ash mingled among the still air. But this is not so. These are ghosts of a ritual that didn’t accomplish enough, just as an ancient voice laden with frosted regret warned him. Naga’s fire had burned in his blood and bones so crystalline cold and clarifying he could only see the sharp clarity of his oncoming victory that could finally turn the tide of their terrible war, as incomplete as it might have been from slaying his foe once and for all.

He searches for seven days, but Naga’s nowhere to be found.

Upon leaving the eastern peninsulas, he wanders in lazy loops through the southern fields of Ylisse with the insistent awareness that he could stay in one place for a while. Find a hatchet, cut down some trees, experiment his way through fitting together logs without nails. Build a house. Build a bed stuffed with wild straw. Put an end to his restless journeys and rough living of one foot constantly in front of another.

But he doesn’t even need to sleep, a routine at best kept up like an ill-formed habit. When even a grievous wound at the goring antlers of a charging moose – absolutely lethal – leaves Chrom with only an ill-tempered couple of hours watching his flesh knit back together and nudging his bones into their correct places, he’ll never have need for a sick bed. Nor need for a cooking hearth beyond the pleasure of fire.

The gravestones of Kalus he erected from roughly hewn rocks dragged through almost a mile of mud are worn down by the rain and winds. All the sharp edges that had cut into his hands are rough and pitted. Several have fallen over. He rights them.

The wildflowers he’d clumsily transplanted over the graves grow rampant and wild in streaks of blues and red. Their tiny heads sway, yellow dimples amid ruffles of white. The grass brushing against his thighs burn purple under the summer sun and at first Chrom draws Falchion to clear away the stalks, then reconsiders. Sheaths Falchion. Bows his head at each stone for a moment instead, wading through the sea of scratchy plants and the mobs of insects, saying a quiet prayer to empty air until the sun sets.

Chrom moves on with burs clinging to his pants and pollen staining his hands. He goes to the port towns crumbling into the ocean in slow motion. He climbs the western mountains. He warily sits by the great Lenan Lake, waters still glittering as they had when he was a boy riding out for a day from the castle. He spends an ill-advised winter by the Maiden Sea which shares its shores with Ylisse, Ferox, and Plegia.

On the fall of the third year since he went to Mount Prism, right when the thought of where the vessel’s gone starts nagging his mind, he runs into them in the ruins of Abeton.

Given their constant exposure under the sun, Chrom thought he and the vessel were both as tan as they were going to be, but it turns out he’s wrong, at least on account of the vessel. He waves a hand at the freckles dotting along darkened skin and says, “Where did you …?”

They glower and mutter with unexpected vitriol, “Plegia.”

“You don’t sound too pleased about that,” he says, off balance.

Their shoulders violently jerk towards their ears, up and down.

Silence comes down in wet, heavy flakes. They cut their hair at some point, so now it only brushes their shoulders instead of curling against the small of their back. Their eyes, still as dark as ever, are hazier now as they stare past Chrom. He squints for a moment, sure he sees them list minutely from side to side, but that doesn’t seem to actually transpire.

Chrom tries to find a tactful way to say, “You look like shit,” fails to, and abandons that whole line of inquiry. Instead, he says, “Where are you going to next?”

They take a whole minute to respond, a third of which spent slowly sliding their gaze back to his face. Despite himself and despite them being largely responsible for all his friends and family’s deaths, a frown of concern inches over him.

They shrug again. “Away.”

Waiting for them to elaborate is a mistake and two awkwardly expectant moments later, Chrom asks, “Anywhere … specific?”

A quicker response: “No.”

“Do you want to come with me for a while then?” he asks.

The vessel blinks with the lethargic pace of thick honey. With a questionable level of commitment, they nod.

“Okay,” Chrom says. “Okay,” he says again. “You, um…”

Their gaze has strayed again. He lifts a hand as if to set it on their shoulder and drops it back down a second later. “Come on then.”

When they’re still there the next morning, Chrom watches their strained silence with wary regard. When they’re still there on the second day, more communicative and stringing together more than one word at the same time, surprise creeps in and Chrom can’t stop glancing at them every few minutes, checking on their unexpected presence. He starts speaking more at them, working all the scratches and static out of his voice and they make no indication of irritation at the waves of sound he scatters around them.

On the third day, a record, they abruptly jerk their head to the side in indication and say, “Bye.”

In a fit of something, Chrom calls after their retreating back, “See you later!”

* * *

Idle conversation comes so rarely, Chrom finds himself asking, “Have you been to the other continents?”

Their head turns to him, tipped over in curiosity.

“Since everyone,” Chrom shrugs, “um.” He gestures at the row of unmarked stones.

The vessel blinks and Chrom thinks he’s getting better at reading the silences, in length and tone. What had seemed emotionless so long ago now seems more like a rowboat set adrift upon waves of deep water, unmoored and trying to find its way back to shore. Finally, they say, “Yes.”

“Did you succeed there?” and understanding or no, Chrom does nothing to hide his bitterness. Let it be heard.

“Succeed?” the vessel murmurs, gaze returned to the stones Chrom hauled through the forest to here. Their shoulder rolls back, just slightly. “Ah, I see.” Slowly picking up their thread again, they crane their head from side to side, like they’re trying to loosen bolts driven through their spine. “Is everyone dead? Yes.”

Shit.

He sets his hand against Falchion without thinking as he asks the air to the side of their head, “How’d you even cross the ocean?”

Their head swivels to face him and of course the only time they can consistently talk to him in a lucid manner is when they’re stabbing him with the barbs of silent insults: “Lord Grima has wings.” 

Chrom’s mouth opens and closes mechanically to say, “Right.”

Standing around under the noon sun is sweltering and Chrom scoops up his discarded shirt, heading off in search of the stream he hears nearby so he can dunk it and himself into the colder waters. The vessel silently grabs both their packs and trails after him. As the stream emerges, Chrom remembers to also ask, “Where the hell is Grima anyways?”

The steps through the foliage behind him stutter. “I don’t – I don’t know. I – Grima, lor- Grima returned me to – I don’t –” he turns, alarmed, and sees them shaking their head, staring at something beyond the leaves and beetles and birds and dirt and worms and deer and bears of the forest, something beyond it all, waiting to fall out of the sky, “—I haven’t seen Grima in years.”

Probably massively overstepping his boundaries but caught still stinging from the revelation that _everyone_ – and so not exactly caring, Chrom asks, “Do you want to see them again?”

That stare flickers to Chrom and he nearly flinches back, seeing through the filter of their silence and eyes, a raw scream inside, _NO_.

Unsure of what to do, sweating profusely despite the shade, and with a lingering, friendly sense of unfairness that the vessel barely worked up a sweat, he pushes them into the river, then leaps in after their yelping, sputtering, and thrashing form.

* * *

By luck, Chrom manages to stumble across a cherry tree with edible fruits that hasn’t been strip mined of its spoils by the local birds yet. For the pleasure of their warm, sweet taste, he plucks fistfuls of yellow and red, eating them while sitting on the low stone blocks of what once upon a time were orchard walls or the foundation stones of a tiny farmhouse. He piles the pits into a pyramid and licks his fingers clean.

* * *

The vessel insists on spearing some fish, blatantly ignoring Chrom heckling from the riverbank, “I don’t have any salt, do _you_ have any?”

They even manage to catch four flopping fish and snatches one of Chrom’s knives with great imprudence to gut and descale them, _also_ ignoring his yelp of, “Hey, not that one! I shave with that one!”

One dinner of roasted fish later, the vessel asks him in a moment of greater lucidity, “Have you ever tried to unmask one of the Risen?”

It’s been so long since Chrom had cause to really think about the monster soldiers that he honestly forgot what they were called and he gets through half a fish, chewing in total confusion, before realization slams into him. Then he doesn’t want to finish his fish anymore.

“Yeesss?” he says, drawn out.

The vessel pauses in tossing sticks into their campfire. “What’s that response about?”

“Let me finish my fish in peace,” Chrom growls.

They fling a twig into his hair. “Answer.”

“No.”

Another twig – “ _Hey,_ cut that out.”

They grab one of the heavier branches.

“ _Stop_ , fine. Yes, we did try to unmask one. It was gross.” He gestures at his face with a clawing motion that manages to get fatty oil on his nose. They throw the branch at him in incomprehension, nearly destroying the fish still in his other hand. “ _Stop that_. It’s face just. Came off. Most of it. Smelled disgusting. _Now_ will you let me eat in peace?”

“No,” they say, and throw one last twig at his face.

Chrom mulishly finishes his tasteless fish and nearly flings the tail at them. But this is the third day they’ve shown no indication of abruptly leaving and he discovers that under everything else the gaping hole of his loneliness and lost comradery had been flung open and exhumed. Granted, the vessel spent over half of that time either sleeping or cast off adrift among the shipwrecks grounded upon their desert dunes and screaming winds. Even so, letting them stay is a terrifying indulgence he’s loath to ruin.

* * *

The next day, Chrom doesn’t catch when the vessel awakens. He glances over while the sky lightens and starts at the dull eyes watching him from where they lay on their side, one arm flung out and the other curled protectively over their side.

“Hey,” he says.

They blink with perfect economy of movement. Then they roll onto their back and don’t move for the next five hours.

Chrom tries asking them things like: “Are you just going to lie there for the rest of the day?” and “Have you seen my spare cloak?” and “What _happened_ in Plegia?” They rouse for nothing, not even when Chrom nudges at their thigh with his foot. For all that their eyes are open and their breathes are shallow with consciousness, they might as well still be asleep.

A thin layer of worry congeals upon his tongue. He squats within their unfocused peripheral vision and turns his thought over and over in his mind. Something must have happened in Plegia, to sink the vessel into these stupors. But _what_ is so far beyond him that he has no ideas where to even start. Did they see something or learn something over the course of those two years that could unmoor them so disturbingly far? What could be so shocking that the end of the _world_ wasn’t enough to shake loose the cold unrelenting determination they had that pushed them through having an arm nearly shredded to ribbons of flesh during the war, that gave them the strength to walk across silent continents after the war? _What did this,_ he asks their unresponsive body while shaking their shoulders against the ground.

“Get up,” he’s almost shouting. “Get up already, we need to go –”

– Where?

He releases their wrinkled clothes and rocks back, sinking down to sit on the ground. He buries his face in his hands. Go where? Do what?

Why is he clinging so hard to the company of the person who personally killed Lissa and almost all his medics in one ambush?

“Get up,” his mouth says, wretched. “Get up, get up already, get _up_.”

Chrom startles when a hand lands on his arm. The sun burns with all its cheerful heat and his eyes have been covered and closed for so long that their white hair almost looks blue as he lifts his head.

“I’m up,” they say, voice clogged with the debris of sleep, hand still on his arm.

He chokes on the surge of confusing relief flushing through his veins in corrosive streams of what’s probably misplaced anguish as he says, “About _time_.”

They watch him and Chrom spends so long trying to figure out what’s in their expression, in the tiny pinch of their eyebrows, that he almost misses them saying, “I think we should split up for a while.”

“What?” croaks Chrom.

They sit up and _oh_ , it’s _remorse_ , it’s a silent apology, that’s what their face is wearing, it’s been so long since Chrom saw something like that he’d completely forgotten what it looked like – they say again, “We should split up.”

“Why?”

“You’re upset,” they plainly say.

Instead of addressing that, Chrom begs, “What on earth happened in Plegia? _Some_ thing’s happened, you can’t tell me nothing did.”

The noonday sun couldn’t be hotter, shining down into the clearing they laid in last night without a single cloud to block its rays, but cold crawls along his nerves unrelentingly. Clarity is back in the vessel’s eyes along with a purposeful judgement, weighing their options and assessing Chrom unraveling from worries he hadn’t expected to appear. Their silence solidifies into a terrible wall rising up between them sitting in the grass and dirt as they decide, “That doesn’t concern you.”

“It does when you keep losing track of what’s around you. I can’t let you go in good conscious like that.” He’s dizzyingly breathless with worry scrambling to take hold of all his thought processes.

The remorse slides off. “It doesn’t concern you,” they say again. “Stop being upset.”

They stand in a surge of movement, “Don’t follow me.”

Chrom scrambles to his feet, but they collect their things and take off so quickly, he has no hope of catching up. The darkness of four new moons come and go, and concern washes upon his shores, and he doesn’t see any hints of them.

* * *

Chrom accidentally runs across the vessel fighting off a bear. “Holy shit,” he says.

This catches enough of their spare attention for them to snarl, “ _You?_ ”

On an elevated plane of delight, Chrom says again, “Holy shit.”

* * *

“I’m heading to Ferox,” Chrom warns the vessel. It’s been too long since he visited the northern mountains with their constantly-snow capped peaks and where the air is so sharply clear each breath burns with a cleansing fire. From high up, he watches sunrise and sunset sweep through the valleys below, shadows marching through the thick evergreens in lock step. There’s simplicity in the lines of a raptor spiraling in the air with wings outstretched.

The vessel grimaces but follows him northwards regardless. As the season barrels headlong into summer, now’s the best time to be in the regions. Regardless, it doesn’t stop them from making their opinions explicitly know; even at the height of the summer, Ferox is barely above freezing cold.

They shiver to the bone, complaining bitterly, “Why do you always go to where it’s cold? Why don’t you spend more time where it’s warm, like towards the south?”

Placidly trying to bribe a horse with some greens that it ignores, Chrom says, “Where would you rather be? In an active volcano where we’d run the constant risk of being buried under lava and ash?”

“ _Yes_. I love Demon’s Ingle.”

He glances at them. The horse trots away. He throws the greens at them instead, where it sticks to the layers of leather and fur they’ve wrapped themselves in, saying over their offended yelping, “Of course you do.”

The vessel slips away to their far away land only once or twice in their travels past Ylisse’s lakes for only a few moments each. As upset and angry as he was – as he still is – about how they split off when Chrom began seeing too much into the vulnerability pried open in their armor, their time away does seem to do them well. Not that they tell him what they did, not when he asks as always. They’d just watched him with the wind dragging through their hair, a new chemise sewn together and thrown over their body, then smiled and looked away with a secretive bemusement and the gentle glow of nature’s self-satisfaction observing a blossoming meadow in springtime.

Chrom tried one last time to learn what happened in Plegia, but they just shoved him away and said, “I told you already, it doesn’t concern you. Stop asking.”

So he stops asking.

By the time the shadows begin lengthening to dusk, even Chrom has to concede to the cold and they begin building a fire to the vessel’s great relief. But despite the near bonfire they light, the vessel keeps edging closer and closer to the flames, until Chrom sighs and say, “Get over here.”

They glance over and say, “What?”

“Get –” he beckons with his hand and begins loosening his cloak. “Come over here if you’re so cold. Come on.”

Staring at him some more, they hesitate. He pats beside him. They get up, walk over and loom over him, still shivering. They sit. He nudges them closer, the better to throw his cloak over the both of them.

When they finally loosen their spine and sink into his warmer body, they sink in hard, pressing up against his side shoulder to hip. He can feel every tremor as they slowly subside, but more importantly is the rush of serene contentment spreading like dense clouds of soft dandelion fluff through him. At touch, at the touch of another human being again because it has been so long since the time where every day he’d get hands slapping his shoulder and back in congratulations, in exalted happiness and victory. Since the press of arms around him and his arms gripping just as tightly, a neck to bury his face into and hugs and embraces to breathe through. He’d fallen into an insidious starvation that slunk in the shadows of his mind, away from the light of awareness, and longed for the warmth of touch that didn’t howl with violence; every time he touched the vessel before had been in a fight or what was soon to become a fight.

Closing his eyes, he lays his head against theirs, his choppy blue strands mingling among their white and his lungs expanding in time with theirs. He whispers, “Better?”

Just as quiet, they whisper back, “Yes. Thank you.” And when they shudder, it is in relief, not cold, relief from that craving hunger to touch.

They sit together late into the night, until they fall asleep still leaning against him with heads tucked together at angles they’ll regret come morning, until the coldest part of the night and through it.

* * *

After that, the vessel starts spending longer and longer stretches with Chrom. They still wander off on their own when the wanderlust strikes them or they bore of his plans, but they always come back. Sometimes they sleep curled against him, sometimes they don’t. Chrom simply goes along with their whims and inclinations, whatever they might be.

Their lucidity grows in leaps and bounds. Each day plows the previous day back into the dirt of history, putting more and more distance between the now and the back then of violent clashes and alien expressions.

The two together make their way back southward along the coast. Sometimes, when the water is warmer, they go for a swim. Chrom carefully does not stare. A couple times, the vessel mutters about building a rough boat, but they never act upon their plans the same way Chrom never acted upon taming a horse or building a complete house. The burning gradients of autumn accompany their travels; this year’s rainfall striking the optimal balance between too much and too little for vibrant leaves that glow like flames in the wind. They tide over winter along the gulf splitting the land between Ylisse and Plegia in a temporary shelter they puzzle out how to construct.

Now with all the birds heralding spring’s arrival, _loudly_ , Chrom spends more and more time outside in the cool sunlight. More often than not, the vessel follows him outside too, even if the most engaging thing he’s doing is polishing Falchion.

Feeling their gaze pressing against the crown of his bent down head, he looks up. They blink at him, a light frown on their face, and they swallow and look away. Chrom sets down his blade and the oiling cloth and asks, “What?”

Still looking away, they shake their head. “Nothing.”

“Seems like something’s on your mind,” Chrom says after packing away his tools and pulling out his needle and his rough-spun thread. He tells them, “Pass me your coat.”

Under the screaming of about seven birds in a death match over nesting rights in the tree above them, they mutter, “It’s really nothing of your concern.”

He’s getting tired of hearing that. Their coat hits Chrom in the face.

Honestly, their coat is almost at the its limits, seams and mends like thick scar tissue across its fabric. They haven’t salvaged enough materials to create a whole new coat yet, but Chrom’s attempting to cure some leather and maybe they’ll be able to make something out of it.

The vessel flops back onto the damp ground and watches the birds dive bombing each other. A couple of bees buzz by. Suddenly, they say, “The pegasi of Ylisstol have gone completely wild and there is nothing quite as terrifying as a herd of hooves sailing through the air, attached to over a ton of beast, all coming right at you.”

Chrom accidentally stabs himself in the thumb. They ignore his curses. He says, “Right, you visited. When was that?”

Waving a lazy hand that nearly collides with one of the fat bees, they say, “Eeeeeh, a while ago. Place looked like a wreck, and in ways beyond what I could possibly be responsible for.”

He sews in determined silence. At the time he couldn’t decide if he was grateful or hateful for the way the vessel conducted the war. The invading army ravaged the countryside and farmland the way all invading armies ravage the countryside and farmland, but not as much as they could have. They had been relentlessly to the point about their objectives: capture this fortress, secure these supply lines, then move on. Moving several hundreds of thousands of people – soldiers, officers, servants, support, prostitutes – through an area always taxes the land, but from the scarce reports Chrom’s intelligence was able to gather, the enemy army always pointedly left just enough for the locals to survive through winter, provided the freeze didn’t prove too harsh. But that was not enough.

When the enemy finally arrived at Ylisstol’s borders – when _Grima_ finally arrived at Ylisstol – just about all of the local population had packed their bags and fled to the stronghold sanctuary the castle promised, ahead of the conquering army. The crops weren’t being torched, why do that when you could reap from them later, but what fault could Chrom find in his people’s terror? His army was on the retreat from a tidal wave of beast and soldiers, glowing red eyes piercing night’s darkness and that terrible rattling of all those death masks with each fetid breath. The rumors swirling about the assaults were terrible, why take any chances?

So even though their numbers swelled within Ylisstol to worrying numbers, and even though he had to spend more time every day chasing after paranoid rumors and claims about saboteurs and spies, Chrom kept his gates open for as long as he could to accept his people made into refuges. Though obviously, it hadn’t done much good in the end.

The vessel tucks their hands back underneath their head and asks, “When was the last time _you_ went to Ylisstol?”

His focus narrows to the fabric in his hands and his needle moving back and forth in its repetitive task so as not to acknowledge any judgmental gazes that the vessel is getting alarmingly good at delivering. “I haven’t,” he says stiffly. “Not since. Before.”

Another stich. His needlework is slowly getting neater. Chrom just barely sees the vessel sitting up in the corner of his vision. His ears capture their incredulousness just fine though. “You never went back?”

“No.”

“Why ever not?”

“How often have you visited Plegia?” He ties off and breaks his thread angrily, yanking at the coat’s cloth more harshly than he should to check the mend’s integrity. “I bet the only time you went was during the couple of years where you suddenly disappeared recently and then came back –” He makes an annoyed gesture and flips the coat over again in search of more places to patch up.

Sounding strangled, the vessel says, “Herald, that’s different.”

“Chrom,” he snaps.

“What?”

“My name’s Chrom.” Finding nothing more to do, he throws the coat back at the vessel’s face. They catch it with perplexed absentmindedness and immediately don it back on.

They lick their lips and then, “Chrom,” they say, testing the waters. He stabs his needle back into the carrying pouch holding all of his sewing supplies. They say, “Alright Chrom. Do not think this is enough to distract me. Yes, I only returned to Plegia once after the war, but that’s still apparently more than you have for Ylisstol.

“No wonder everything was so worn down and falling apart so much,” they muse.

He doesn’t actually care for hearing about all their thoughts and opinions on this issue as a matter of fact. If Chrom doesn’t want to go back to Ylisstol, that’s his business and they should leave it alone, the same as he ultimately left alone their hang ups including, still, whatever the hell happened in Plegia that changed them so drastically. He stands up and announces, “I’m going back inside.”

Calling after his retreating back, they say, “Herald – Chrom – you can’t just ignore this.”

Well watch him. He did and he can.

* * *

“I’m not letting you anywhere near my neck with a knife,” Chrom shouts as he vaults over a fallen tree truck.

“If you aren’t going to shave that dead mammal off your face, then _I will_ ,” comes the scream behind him. Chrom runs faster.

Sharp wind howls as it crashes and claws through the foliage, shredding bark on his tail. Cursing, Chrom leaps to the left, feet pounding along the faint path of animal tracks. A snarl in an ever-shortening distance, and another blade of wind cuts after him, aiming to debilitate, just barely before aiming to kill. Chrom yells, “Alright, al _right_ , I’ll shave, you don’t need to try murdering me, stop it.”

“You said you’ll shave yesterday and the day before, but I don’t see any of those results,” comes from above.

His head snaps up, “What the -” and the vessel crashes onto them, a storm of limbs and bruising impacts. He yelps as a knife flashes by his ear. “Why do you even have a knife, that’s not one of mine, you never carried any knives before.”

A streak of sunlight glints off the shining blade. In a rough, panting voice, the vessel hisses, “I had to hunt down and restore this _just_ so I could get that afront off your face.” They slap it onto his chest. “ _Shave_.”

“Okay, okay, get off me.” Chrom flops his hands out in surrender. “I can’t shave with you on me or while pinned to the ground. Come on, I need at least clean water.”

Grumbling, they clamber off. A shock of light electricity jolts him as he gets on his feet and makes the mistake of patting them on the shoulder with a friendliness he hasn’t earned back yet. “You wouldn’t be so mean about this if you had any facial hair too,” he tells their back and their long swinging ponytail.

“Yes, I would,” they snipe back.

* * *

Chrom runs up to where the vessel stands in the distance, atop the crest of a hill, watching the harvest moon rise huge and orange from the horizon. It has been a month since they last split ways and he claps a hand on their shoulder in greeting. Distracted, they say, “Hey,” then more focused, “I’ve completely lost track of what year it is, but I think I remember that there’s supposed to be a lunar eclipse around now.”

They consider the moon for a beat longer. “Or maybe we already missed it,” they admit with a wry sadness.

“Can’t say I recall the moon turning red recently,” he tells them.

Brightening, they say, “Good, then we may have a while yet. And someday maybe we’ll be lucky enough to be in the right spot for a total solar eclipse. Wouldn’t that be fun?”

Chrom shrugs. “I guess.”

They vibrate with happiness at his side, the swollen moon rising higher and higher. The orchestra of frogs and insects fill the air with their concertos to the accompaniment of an owl hooting its solo piece.

Abruptly they say, “The first time I saw the sky without anything in the way of my view was, oh, when I was about thirteen? Something around then and I was never able to see the moon and stars well since all the windows where I was kept were so narrow. I was so amazed with all that blue going on forever that I nearly ruined the training exercise I was brought out to attend in the first place.” They laugh, “That was also the first time I got a sunburn.”

Chrom glances over at them. “What?”

“Yeah, I just remembered that,” they laugh again. The moon’s reflected light shines in their eyes and their neck slowly bends back along the moon’s path, tracking it the way sunflowers loyally trail after the sun. In the darkness, he can barely see their smile. “It’s been so long, and I still think it’s amazing.”

In the darkness of night, Chrom can’t see the details of their face, can’t see the details of how they react when he says, quietly from a pinprick slowly widening and beginning to ache, “What do you mean you never saw the sky while you were young?”

Their shadows turn towards him. “Exactly what I said. Did you think I said things I didn’t mean?”

“Why?” he asks even as the hole aches wider and he dreads what he’ll fill it with from the materials of their past.

They stand in silence, then: “You never learned, did you, about what it takes to create the perfect vessel to sacrifice towards the resurrection of the fell dragon.”

“No,” Chrom agrees.

“You really never knew,” they marvel. “You never wanted to find out? Your father obviously was very concerned about the prospect. For obvious reasons too, I don’t blame him, though he was too late regardless.”

In the vault that holds what remains of Chrom’s memories of his parents, clearest among the blurry images is his father’s silence. And his hand, resting briefly upon Lissa’s tiny head, for he was finally back in Ylisstol with the smell of dust still upon the edges of his cloak, already having missed her birth. Chrom stands a distance away, waiting for his turn to play with his new sister. His mother murmurs something to his father who doesn’t look up from his daughter, doesn’t acknowledge her voice except for a belated nod. Without a single glance at Chrom, he sweeps out of the room, back to the field.

It’s the last time he sees his father alive; the next time he sees his father, it’s when the castle servants and Emmeryn finally bring him to see where his father’s body is laid in state, his years of warmongering finally catching him in the trap he himself created.

“We didn’t talk much,” Chrom tells the night.

“But weren’t you the next Exalt?” they ask.

He shakes his head, for all that they’re invisible in the night with only the thinnest slivers of silver along their outlines. “Emmeryn was next. Not me.”

“Emmeryn,” they repeat in a whisper. “Blonde? A sister?”

“Yes.”

They hum, low and considering, into the darkness of the night and among the swirls of his resurfacing memories. Emmeryn, holding a scepter too larger and how the castle workshops had scrambled to craft her a crown that would fit her head, their mother also already passed away. The chalky dust that had solidified upon Lissa’s face when he finally found her among the horrifically long lines of the dead laid out for identification, patches of her skin burned black and the whole lower half of her left leg missing. He stood in a frozen state until Cordelia finally found him and told him through her tears that it was time to go.

“I think I remember her now,” they whisper. “Strange. She didn’t make as strong an impression as I thought she would. But that doesn’t matter. To make a sacrificial vessel of such magnitude, you can’t just select anyone from the streets. Even among the best dark mages, none would do; the vessel must be _crafted_ as you would any clay container. Someone with the right blood – strong enough to withstand the fire of a dragon, yet weak enough to be controlled – must be born and then kept alive and tempered through rituals and training until they reach the right age. They were unwilling to take any risks after the fates finally granted them the luck of my birth.”

“And thus the whole … not going outside thing.”

“Yes,” they confirm with that needle-sharp wryness again. “That’s the short of it.”

They watch the moon rising through the sky. He asks, “Are you having trouble remembering things?”

“ _That_ hasn’t reached your concern yet. But do what you wish,” the vessel tells him, which is _not_ an answer, despite everything they seem to believe.

Then their voice is suddenly closer besides him, “Though tell me Chrom, what have _you_ avoided remembering?”

His castle crumbles.

* * *

He has nothing but pure boredom to excuse why he asks, “When was the last time you had sex? Obviously a long time given the givens, but…” He trails off expectantly.

The vessel pauses in their slicing, leaning back onto their heels in consideration. They admit, “I … hadn’t many opportunities for such experiences on my own volition. Not to say I never tried, but … it would have been around the beginning of my participation in the wars. I don’t remember anymore.”

They glance back down at the slices of too sour apples in their hand and say, “What about you? Crown royalty of Ylisse, I imagine you had no difficulties bedding whoever you wished whenever you wanted. How often did you do it?”

“I was married,” Chrom says suddenly, tangentially. He opens his mouth but can’t continue. A solid block of air chokes off his words. The vessel watches him with undisguised caution.

They say, “I didn’t kill them personally, did I,” even gesturing with the knife.

Chrom trips over himself, saying in a rush, “No, no, you didn’t.”

Not with their hand. But they also _did_ , by commanding their troops, by calling down a sudden storm livid with lightning striking down at all their enemies with such ferocious thunder that when Chrom’s troops finally managed to drag themselves away in retreat through the walls of wind penning them in for the slaughter and back to him and his main column several days later, decimated, all their ears still rang.

Chrom wrenches himself to the side and bites out, too quiet, “Forget it.”

Birds trill in the silence, then a distilled moment later, the knife chops through apple flesh with muffled thumps once more.

They bite a slice with a crisp snap of apple flesh parting and tell him through their mouthful, “We should go to Ylisstol at some point.”

“Not anytime soon,” he growls.

A chunk of apple core smacks against his forehead. “Why not?”

“Gross,” he spits, wiping at his face and getting apple juice all over his hands instead. “I don’t want to.”

The next bite is judgmental. “What kind of general do you make when you refuse to face the reality of your situation?”

“We haven’t had armies for decades, neither of us are generals anymore. We got the whole world killed, that’s the reality of our situation,” Chrom tells them tartly. “There, I’m facing it. I have been facing it this whole time and I was facing it while you invaded Ylisstol and I’ve been facing it since your king killed Emmeryn.”

“Oh, is that how she died?” they ask distractedly, like they don’t remember, because, increasingly clearly, they really, actually _don’t remember_.

“Yes,” Chrom hisses bitterly. He’s no longer a hot-headed youth not yet completely grown into adulthood, challenging everyone he was allowed to who drew his ire on this topic, but increasingly he _wants_ to.

They say dismissively, “Hmm. Well if you decide to never lay this ghost to rest, then I’m not responsible for you wearing yourself down to dust.”

He grinds his teeth and rubs at the sticky spot on his forehead sourly. It’s absolutely not what he wants to hear come from their mouth as long as it’s attached to their scrambled mind.

* * *

The more the vessel pushes towards the direction of Ylisstol, the harder Chrom digs in his heels, increasingly out of pure spite. In a change of pace, _he_ tries splitting away from them, but the vessel has far better luck at quickly tracking Chrom back down within a few days, even when he leaves in the middle of the night when they’re fast asleep. They keep sliding up besides Chrom with pointed looks and sarcastic remarks that have him almost longing for their much quieter past demeanor.

“All your reasons for not going to Ylisstol are debunked and hollow,” they say. “Stop being stubborn and stupid, we’re _going_.”

“If you want to go so badly, you can go alone,” says a thoroughly cross Chrom. “But you don’t have to drag _me_ along. Why can’t you respect that?”

They round on him and get into his space with a finger poking at his chest and their hair flying in a halo from the momentum. “I do thank you for respecting my wishes while I was dragging myself out of the sinkhole I was flung into by the people who claimed to have raised me. As a matter of fact, I was spending most of the last several decades reclaiming myself from the realm of the _dead_. I don’t think you knew this, but however much time you spent with this body before I crawled back out of Plegia, that wasn’t spent with _me_. That was spent with – gods I don’t even know what was in control of this body, I barely remember, it might have been me under a hundred mental shackles or it might have been Grima, I don’t know. I just have scattered memories of experiences that weren’t wholly mine.

“Did any of that concern you? No, not really! Does whatever guilt you seem to still harbor for what happened at Ylisstol – which, incidentally, is also quite misplaced, what did you think you could do against the inevitability of Grima while Naga was weakening so quickly with every moment – does that guilt really have anything to do with me? Not really either. _But at least I wasn’t running away from my horrors_.” They’re almost frenetic with the tidal current of their own words.

“I am not running away from my – horrors,” Chrom says with a clipped, precise enunciation.

Dripping with skepticism, they say, “Re _ally_.”

Two weeks later, the vessel gets their way, cornering him and herding him ever towards the east and towards the central stretch of the old halidom.

Chrom enters Ylisstol’s embrace as a stranger.

The forests have completed the invasion Grima began in a dense shell of evergreens and beech and maples and scattered, towering giant oaks, the great crowns of them all. Under the weight of their roots, the ceilings to the cellars and kitchens have collapsed. No longer tamed into benign ornaments by gardeners, the ivy draped upon the walls grow wild and crumble the stone with their roots. One of the western towers, where Chrom’s tutors taught him what they could of etiquette and statesmanship, is little more than rubble smashed upon the ground in mossy heaps. Gaping segments of the ceiling over the central great hall have collapsed and through one such holes an oak climbs to the sky.

The very smell of the land invades the castle: the green of leaves and the wet brown of dirt. Water pools in dark hallways, protected by shadows from the sun’s hot rays. It trickles and drips. All the pendants and tapestries hang in bleached tatters with birds actively stripping threads out of the warp and weft to line their nests. There’s a pack of wild dogs making a home out of shredded chairs and beds on the third floor. They discover a few bodies in hidden corners and passages that Chrom missed.

Six hours after they arrive, as the sun begins to set and the shadows deepen in the library filled with the sweet smell of rotting paper, Chrom turns on the balls of his feet and walks out of the ruins. A few minutes later the vessel joins him.

“Why did you bring me here,” he asks them hoarsely. He walked past an alcove more than five times before realizing with a jolt that it was Emmeryn’s favorite sitting room to entertain her noble guests in. Along the walls were floor to ceiling panels of carved wood reliefs of a forest, each vein on each leaf and each tuft of fur on each wide-eyed doe etched and polished in loving detail. Each giant panel took the palace workshop months to create and Emmeryn had smiled in deep gratefulness as the master carver and her apprentices wept with joyful tears at the sight of their work installed among the mirrors and curtains that fluttered in the wind like a gentle sea. He’d learned to his shock that each hand-painted branch took hours of numbing labor. Now it’s all buried under dirt.

“You couldn’t finish mourning without coming here,” they say.

A laugh scraps like sandpaper against his throat as he says incredulously, “Mourn? I can hardly even believe this is Ylisstol. That this is… The castle crypt is completely inaccessible. I can’t even mourn for my _family_ ; how can I mourn for…”

He turns desperate eyes upon them. The sun’s golden light stains their skin with a fiery orange and gilds their hair with filigree of gold. The trees have grown so _massive_ where there were never trees before.

“Why am I here?” And preempts the frown forming on their expression, “No, I mean, why are _you_ here, why is either of us here. How are we – how are either of us – how –”

An inarticulate terror strangles his voice, killing off whatever he could say, however he could say –

“How are either of us alive?” the vessel asks. “We weren’t human before they died. We weren’t human while they died. That’s why we didn’t die and still have not died.”

“That’s terrible,” Chrom croaks.

The vessel looks this way and that, taking in the insects rising in their evening crescendo and life coming alive with the arrival of dusk and then night. They shrug and cross their arms. Whatever grief they had over this matter has long been laid to rest.

“We’ll stay here a week,” they decide, then sneak a glance at Chrom and whatever his face is doing. Cautiously, they say, “Or we can leave. If it’s really too much for you.”

He scrubs his face, then pulls away his hands in surprise: there are tears smeared upon his thumb and palms. Defeated by cold shadows cast from the spires of – not the castle, not his home – the ruins, he says, “We’re already here. We might as well stay.”

They make camp closer to where the town used to be, where it’s easier to ignore the husk looming in the distance. Chrom begins to form half a notion to – clear the grounds? Clean out the mold and damp? Uproot all these trees?

No, he kills the thought before it can solidify, staring at the stars above. The vessel sleeps curled against his side. He abandoned these hearths for too long to do that and what would he do after? Stay trapped here, tied down to his fruitless battle against the elements to preserve Ylisstol, crumbling against his inevitable loss?

Perhaps here is why he resisted his homecoming so hard: When he walked away, shovel in hand, his heart knew he could not handle the grief of his return even if his mind had not processed the fact. Any pilgrimage he made to home, to the caretaker of his childhood, would end with the howl of the wind pushing its victims over a great precipice. Ylisstol will never be again.

* * *

On the sixth day of the vessel’s self-proclaimed week, they find a wine cellar full of barrels and bottles. Overjoyed, the vessel whoops with satisfaction at their newfound treasury and loads Chrom’s arms with heavy glass bottles full of rich red liquid to his bemusement. In one of their infrequent displays of strength, they heft a whole barrel against their shoulder and excitedly say, “I miss wine _far_ too much. I don’t even care if all of this has gone bad and tastes terrible, I’ll still drink it.”

“Alright,” Chrom says agreeably.

They bring their bounty aboveground and the vessel immediately sets upon the wire basket holding a bottle shut. With a few twists of their knife, they pop the cork out, sniff the alcohol within, and then begin drinking straight out of the bottle in their impatience.

Laughing, Chrom tries to pry the bottle out of their grip, saying, “Come on, cut that out, that’s so unsightly. You can wait a few minutes for me find and washes some glasses.”

“I really can’t. This hasn’t even gone bad, I want it _now_.”

“Oh, well, let me try some too then.” They relinquish the bottle to him.

The next day, Chrom awakens to true misery. Immortality didn’t grant him any immunities against the consequences of alcohol; if anything, his tolerance is far lower from so long in its absence. He opens his eyes and sees both that the vessel is awake before him for once and also the true error of his ways. He also sees that at some point in time, they made their way into a bare room stripped of just about everything except an incongruously fresh pile of hay. Rain patters against the roof. He covers his eyes with his hands and moans.

“Yeah,” they say too loudly. “That was some surprisingly good wine.”

“Please shut up,” he begs them.

“No, was that a kiss you tried to give my cheek?”

“What?”

There’s the shifting sound of fabric moving but Chrom refuses to look. “You kind of… smushed your face against mine. And then passed out. Your beard itches.”

“I don’t remember this,” he tells them.

“Well, _I_ do.”

“I don’t.”

“ _Chrom_ ,” they say, piercingly.

“Please don’t do that –” he pauses. He can’t believe he’s never asked, “What’s your name?”

Now there’s silence. He uncovers his eyes and inches them open.

“Come on, give me your name, what you were called before all this,” Chrom groans over his pounding headache and the sparks dancing in his vision.

In the candlelight, their face frowns into something that can be misconstrued as concern. “What makes you think I’ll give you a name?”

His head’s killing him. Dragging his arm over his eyes to try alleviating some of the stabbing pain with each heartbeat, he says, “I can't just keep calling you ‘the vessel’ in my head for eternity and shouting ‘Hey, you.’ It’s already awkward enough for all the years we’ve known each other.”

Silence drags on. Chrom warily shifts his arm and opens his right eye enough to squint at them and their poleaxed expression. They shrug, “You’re – it doesn’t seem like such a big problem. You and others didn’t seem to have any issues with that.”

Chrom’s too hungover to fully process whatever new issue he accidentally unearthed. The pounding in his head intensifies. Still, he hunches over into sitting upright, rubbing his hands over his face and tries to ignore the itchy straw half down his collar and strings together words to say, “You do have a name right? This isn’t just you getting a kick out of messing around with me. Again.”

When the silence stretches on for too long, Chrom lifts his head to a sight he hasn’t seen in a while. They stare into the air between them, candlelight flickering over their unsure face, eyes fixedly forward, diving for a buried treasure whose map was long burned to ash.

They pull out of the silence in inches and slow blinks and slow breaths. Finally, they tell him, “If I can remember, I’ll let you know. I think. I think I’d like my name back.”

They end up spending a few more days in Ylisstol. Though it pains him, they find a way to break into the castle crypts where generations of his family lay. Using incense Chrom finds in a pried open cupboard, the vessel helps him light a candle for each lord and lady with a fingertip of magical flame, the way they light every fire. It’s not technically the correct way to go about the rites, but he’s not in the business of insisting on details.

The forest also grows among the rough uneven graves Chrom dug in circles around the castle ages ago. The vessel twists plucked wildflowers into tiny bouquets with deft maneuvers of their fingers. Chrom lays them one by one against the crude, eroded headstones.

And since the vessel never explicitly tells Chrom to shut up, he keeps pushing.

“We could try names?” Chrom suggests. “Maybe –”

“ _No_ ,” they instantly snap with an irate fire, like lightning roaring across a plain while tearing a tree apart with brilliant power. “No names.”

He shifts his weight cautiously while watching their tense shoulders. “Alright,” he says slowly, testing the waters. “No names.”

They growl in a low rumble.

The next morning, Chrom wakes up alone, their belongings packed and long gone.

* * *

Chrom stays in Ylisstol for – for? For about another week? He keeps track of the days far less steadily than the vessel does.

He finds the tiara crown he was going to give his first daughter. He finds the cracked dolls Lissa played with in her girlhood. He finds the scroll of Emmeryn’s favorite story she kept in a plain mahogany box besides her bed.

He… makes his peace.

The vessel’s right; he’s carried the flame of Ylisstol and the kingdom he failed for too long and it had fed upon all his marrow and flesh until he’d been unwittingly carrying a container of ashes within him. There aren’t any more graves to dig. There isn’t anything more for him to do in service of history. He’s already knelt at the shrines of all he could grieve.

Hadn’t he already walked this whole land draped in remorse and asking for forgiveness? He’s more than done his task in penance and now all that remains is to set aside the past and before and decide what to do with the present and the horizon-blue future. His ghosts and horrors are all laid to rest.

He walks along what’s the best he can figure of the old paths to Lake Lenan. The lake shore’s changed slightly since his childhood, but there’s still the jut of land going into the water where he can skip stones across the surface. He picks up a pebble and manages almost a dozen hops a few hours later.

But about a month later, going by the moon, Chrom uncovers that insidious loneliness seeping through him again, but worse this time: he’s begun thinking of the vessel as a _friend_. When the shift happened, he has no way to tell. Probably around when they came back from Plegia or even earlier.

For all their words about control over their mind and body, Chrom doubts Grima ever had a hand on the reins. At their coldest in the beginning, there’d been none of the dragon’s leering superiority. But something under a hundred mental shackles sounds about right.

Now he cares for them. Cares for their ridiculous sleep habits and their whining about the cold and their avid affection for fruits of all kinds. He cares for them and their confident magic; their arrogant smile and their attempts to teach him wargames; their shining brightness despite the miasma of their life, what bits and pieces he can see of a trapped childhood and constant talk of “sacrifices” like they’d nailed them to an alter and cut a hole open wide enough in their chest to pour a whole dragon into.

Problem is, as much as he cares for them, he can’t _find_ them. They have decided that something isn’t Chrom’s concern again and bailed before he can force an answer out of them. This habit continues to be frustrating.

He finds a hatchet, cuts down some trees, and experiments his way through building a house among Ylisse’s southwestern fields. Though his planks of wood may be uneven and slightly crooked, he finds a way to fit the pieces together and nails it all together with scavenged nails he polishes free of rust. He makes a mattress of straw and slowly furnishes the inside of his small one-room cottage with clumsily made ornaments and bits of materials picked up from the ground that are interesting. With a sigh, he knocks down a wall and rebuilds it with a better fireplace and chimney.

It takes Chrom many tries to figure out how to shingle his roof and from the vantage point of the sturdy beams bearing the roof’s frame, he sees a figure approaching from the distance. He waves.

The vessel draws closer and pats the wooden sides of his building. They say, “Nice house.”

“Thanks,” he tells them and swings back down to the ground. He asks, friendly, “How have you been?”

They cut their hair again, to the shortest he’s ever seen it, the ends curling gently in soft waves around their face. They also made new clothing again, something soft and breezy and sleeveless that exposes their arms above the bracers they made out of Chrom’s more successful attempts at leather. “Well enough,” they say. “I wasn’t expecting you to be settling down.”

“Here’s as nice as any,” he says with a shrug.

Here, flowers in blue and gold and pink stretch on forever among the waves of grass and shrubs. And besides the sparrows and the foxes and the mice, there are no bodies buried beneath this ground.

“It is,” they agree.

He nods and steps back through the open doorway to put away the tools he carried down with him from the unfinished roof. The vessel follows him to the doorway and when he doesn’t come back out, hesitantly steps inside. They take in the conch shell set on a shelf that he lugged across half the continent in his bags, poking his hands every time he fished around for his sewing kit. Chrom had gratefully shed his makeshift spinning wheel and loom into a corner and has coils of braided rope draped upon a stool that the vessel drifts towards.

“Very homey,” they say.

Casually, he tells them, “There’s room for you too.”

Their head snaps to him so quickly he winces internally at the crack he can almost hear. Baffled, they ask, “You made space for me?”

“Surely you’re tired of walking everywhere too.”

“I don’t even have a name yet,” they say plaintively. “Why did you do this?” Then more suspiciously, “Do you think you can _trap_ me?”

Chrom rushes to reassure them, “No, no, nothing like that. You’re my friend, that’s all. I’d always offer my home to a friend.”

They stare at him poleaxed with an expression of faint confusion mingling with an almost-glower. “I’m your,” they say helplessly. “When did you get that idea in your head?”

Shrugging beatifically, he says, “No idea. Does that really matter? At least stay the night. There’s plenty of bedding. It took me several tries to figure it all out.”

“Your bed’s big enough for both of us,” they say with a glance over at his mattress. “Do you even sleep enough to use that?”

“I do now.”

* * *

Chrom doesn’t have any of the food the vessel indulgently likes on hand the next morning when they finally roll out of bed. They still have a perplexed expression when they sit on his only other stool at the other side of the rough plank of wood he’s calling a table. “You intend to make a home out of this, don’t you?” they ask.

“I think so,” he says, though as the words leave his mouth the certainty sinks in as solid and sure as steel that he will and that he is. “I don’t need to travel everywhere anymore. This might not be permanent, but it’ll be good for me to have somewhere grounding I can return to.”

Leaning back, the vessel sits in a considering silence. They watch birds wheeling through the air on the other side of the open doorway. Sunlight pours in through the open ceiling and Chrom’s growing increasingly amenable to contriving some sort of hinged panel he can open and shut as he pleases. He’s spent too long out in the open to feel completely comfortable with the stars blocked from his sight anymore and in the height of summer it won’t rain for days.

Softly, the vessel says, “If you seriously consider me a friend and wish for me to live under the same roof as you, there are some things you should know. Some things about my past, that like you, I’ve only recently conquered.”

They look at Chrom and he tenses. “I bore the mark of Grima since birth and every year I aged, my potential grew more unavoidably obvious. Only my mother had apprehensions and I believe she made plans to escape with me as a babe, but she must have taken too long with preparations. For as soon as her body would accept my father’s seed again, they impregnated her, eager to replicate my success.

“But whatever fluke created me could not be called upon again so easily and none of my siblings could match my might. This didn’t make them worthless for just as my abilities could fell enemies, it could turn on them as effectively. To make their intentions and control absolutely clear after a particularly outspoken incident from me, they sent my youngest sister to the battlefield. She came back a month later among the bodies thrown upon the frontlines as cannon fodder. By then, my mother had long ended her own life, unable to stand her demotion from one of their greatest sages to breeding stock.

“This hardly gave pause to my father or the rest of their efforts. Once I was chained to a bed with a boy I’d made the mistake of befriending pushed upon me, another example to make clear my position. There was also a girl several years older than me that my father found and who bore him two daughters. When she discovered their affinity for dark magic surpassed her, she became so jealous she almost strangled one to death. Only by chance did I happen upon her in the act and in a fit of rage fueled by the recent news of the deaths of two of my brothers, I struck her and killed her instead.

“By the time I was finally released from my cage, I was ready to do anything and everything to protect what remained of my family and the ones I loved.”

They smile, _gently_ , at Chrom’s stricken face and whisper with a self-deprecating laugh, “Look at us now. I can’t remember a single one of their names.”

Chrom sits in shocked silence because, _because_ he hadn’t known, he hadn’t thought something so, the monument of so many words pouring out of them like blood from a gushing wound – “I’m sorry.”

They laugh again, “What are you – There’s nothing for you to be sorry about. You didn’t have any fault in what happened.”

“Still, I’m. I’m sorry.”

In the cold drips of snow melting in spring’s creeping warmth, their expression slides off drop by drop. Their smile fades away completely, and they whisper hoarsely, “Thank you, Chrom.”

He draws a breath to re-center himself. “Stay,” he tells them. “You don’t need a name yet, that can come on its own with time. This isn’t a trap or another cage for you. Our pasts are buried. I don’t know what the future will bring, but we can take it as it comes from a new beginning.”

Nodding, they turn away again, once more looking out to the birds singing and chasing each other in circles outside. One of them lands upon the packed dirt Chrom cleared in front of his door, its red breast heaving. A thoughtful frown forms on the vessel’s face, watching the bird cock its head in curiosity and fly away after a hop. Their eyes trail after it.

“Alright,” they say. “Alright, I’ll stay. A new beginning, huh? That sounds… that sounds good.”

**Author's Note:**

> Some further spoiler-ish warnings: loss of agency, dehumanization, briefly mentioned past non-con, allusions to human sacrifice? robin's life in this au is the pits. also some somewhat graphic descriptions of dead bodies 
> 
> If this Chrom and Robin were stuck in a hijacked car together, driving along the endless, empty highways of post-apocalyptic mid- and southwest America, and the music player was broken so it could only play one song, it would be “Hey Jude.” Thanks, coffee shop, for playing that incessantly.


End file.
